


The Serpent and the Rainbow

by foundCarcosa



Category: Norse Mythology
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-03
Updated: 2012-07-03
Packaged: 2017-11-09 03:11:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/450606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unlikely pair, perhaps, but as likely as any. The Gate-Keeper and the Shape-Changer find an uneasy kind of solace before the end of all things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Serpent and the Rainbow

**I.**

There are nine realms — nine, and Heimdall’s gaze reaches them all.  
A deliberate blink brings him from the blackened earth of Muspellheim to the eternal tundra that is Jotunheim; a moment’s shift of attention takes him from the sprawling, smog-choked cities of Midgard to the realm at his back, the realm of the aesir, the mighty Asgard.

Very rarely he looked upon the shining realm. He was to guard it, to see to its safety, and to wait for Yggdrasil’s fateful shudder. When he stood at the edge of the world and gazed, he gazed out. Out, as far as his vision would go. Far…

This time, he gazed in.  
Asgard was quiet — the einherjar had ceased their spirited sparring and were preparing to settle in Odin’s great Hall to dine. He caught snatches of banter, but did not stall to listen. Should he hearken to every whisper, every murmur, he would surely never rest.  
In the baths, Sif flipped her ropy black hair with wicked intent, and the wet ends raised weals on Thor’s skin. Their roughhousing deepened the scowl on Loki’s face; he’d wanted a quiet, uneventful bath, and to summon shadows to cavort behind the great tubs for his entertainment. He wished for his own baths, far from them all — but he was only counted among them, not truly one of them, and was cursed with sharing.

But Baldur… Heimdall turned his gaze slightly upwards, to find the shining aesir luxuriating in his bath, humming lowly under his breath. The water was unperturbed by him, as if he were truly made of sunlight as some theorised, and not flesh. He stretched, standing, revealing what water had previously obscured, and Heimdall blinked.

The gilt details of his home shimmered into view — the canopied bed, the vast bath, the single flagon of mead that never ran dry. The robe and boots that he donned when he stepped out of his haven to set foot on the bridge and greet the dawn.

His home had no walls. No ceiling. It needed none of these things… no one could enter, save for him.  
It was The Way Things Were.  
Himinbjörg was Heimdall’s, until Heimdall fell, and then it would be no one’s.

But whilst Thor may one day share Bilskírnir with the lady, Sif, and whilst Odin and Frigga are bound by the very machinations of the universe itself, Himinbjörg would only have one occupant, at all times.

Heimdall crossed to take up the flagon of mead, and drank, and drank deeply.

**II.**

Baldur came, another time, when the warriors had bedded down and Sól had been driven to shine elsewhere. But even as Heimdall gathered his robe around him and went to greet the other, he knew it was not truly the shining one who hailed.

“Your eyes, Bright One,” and what was the sense in being called bright by the one called shining? “Your eyes, they burn me.”

Heimdall lifted an eyebrow, and waited.

“I feel your gaze upon me, in places where I should not feel it. Tell me, is it not true that you gaze outward, at the other realms, in order to ensure the safety of ours?”

Heimdall’s answer did not come, and a wicked smile curved Baldur’s rosy lips. The expression was dissonant, as if his features were unused to forming it.  
The guardian’s golden eyes narrowed, a barely perceptible gesture.

“Well, if not that, tell me,” Baldur continued, unruffled, striding forward with a distinctly serpentine grace that he should not have possessed, “what draws your gaze when the shadows grow long and the halls grow silent? You can see all, can you not? What tempts you?”

“You are not Baldur.”  
It was a relief to say this, to be sure of it and speak it as truth. Better this, than to focus upon not-Baldur’s questions. His sharp, keen smile. His proximity.  
Not-Baldur faltered, fleetingly, but just enough.

“I am Baldur now. Is that not what you wish? For the shining one to enter your shining halls?” Heimdall bristled as if something untoward had been whispered in his ear — in such an unctuous voice, the phrase did not sound benign. _Shining halls,_ indeed.

“Go, now,” but there was little conviction in Heimdall’s ponderous voice. Baldur, not-Baldur, snaked silken-skinned hands under the folds of the guardian’s robes, and smiled his wicked, not-right smile, and for a while, Heimdall’s will and want forced him to believe.

**III.**

The next time, not-Baldur was Sif, heavy black hair and subtle curves. She was Sif, and Heimdall believed.

And then non-Sif was Baldur again, but his flesh was cool to the touch, and perhaps there was a glint of sharp green behind the blue of those eyes.

And perhaps it was neither of these figures upon whom Heimdall turned his gaze when he was alone and restless, but the surly, gaunt not-aesir who courted the shadows.

“No,” Heimdall spoke when the shapeshifter came again, clad in his favoured form. Or, what he perceived to be Heimdall’s favoured form.

“No?” His hip cocked, he raised his hands. _I’ve clad myself in the skin of everyone’s most treasured son, and for no one but you. Are you not grateful?_

“I name you,” Heimdall asserted, pinching not-Baldur’s chin between thumb and forefinger. His far-seeing eyes bored into the keen blue ones until they blurred into the hues of the deep sea, and then into the hues of the deep forest. _“Loki.”_

The flesh in his hand lost substance, became gaunt and narrow, and the healthy sheen of Baldur’s stolen flesh paled into the trickster’s greyish pallor. Loki’s maddening grin flickered on like a lamp, gaining intensity, widening, until Heimdall’s large fingers could no longer hold onto the face it warped.

“I only gave you what you wanted, Guardian,” Loki chuckled, but there was something brittle in his mirth. Heimdall watched him, dolefully, and Loki didn’t like that. He skirted around the gatekeeper, and his narrow fingers were icicles at the nape of his neck. “And oh, you wanted it. There is no need to thank me, personally, of course…” _Surely that is why you wished me to show myself. Correct?_

Heimdall heard the words unspoken, just as he heard the growing of grass on Midgard and the crackling of ice on Jotunheim and the subconscious song of the elves on Alfheim and Svartalfheim. He shook his head, a slow and deliberate movement, and clamped a hand around the trickster’s wrist, holding him fast.  
Loki stilled in his grip, stiffening. His laughing mouth scowled now, and it was as unnatural as the mocking grin on Baldur’s face had been. And he would not meet Heimdall’s gaze.

“You are not Baldur. You are not Sif. Should I have wanted them, I would have been unsatisfied with you.” Even through the molasses-slow deliverance of words — Heimdall could no more speak quickly than the thunderer, Thor, could traverse the Bifrost — Loki held still and quiet. Not many could.  
He let go of the thin wrist, reached for hair blacker than deep night, found that it flowed over his fingers like water. Whether Loki knew that his head automatically turned and tilted, so that his cheek brushed Heimdall’s palm, was unknown even to the one who saw and heard all. “Your trickery was twofold. You led me to believe I wanted them, and I believed.”

 _“Feh.”_ Loki spat, shadows collecting under his cheekbones, around his eyes. “You want anyone that will even deign to come to you, out here, at the end of the earth…”

Heimdall closed the small distance between them, saving his words. “Perhaps.”

**IV.**

For a time, a significant time, Loki did not come again. Heimdall kept his impassive gaze on the eight realms that were not his own, and turned his mind from the trickster.

He had shifted even as Heimdall quickened for him, deepened his skin into the healthy glow of the aesir’s, streaked his raven hair with gold to rival the gleam of Heimdall’s own. And when the guardian pulled away, disappointed, _stricken,_ Loki had smiled his maddening smile, his dagger-grin, his weapon.  
And he’d left. A wisp of shadow flickered where he’d been, and then that, too, was gone.

The gatekeeper resumed his vigil, and turned his mind from the trickster.

**V.**

“You know what this is, do you not, _Guardian?”_ The strident tone took on a mocking lilt at the title. “This” was Loki’s body, at which he was gesturing with fingers that gnarled in disdain. Without a ghost of a greeting, he’d launched into his tirade, his footsteps still ringing on the shimmering bridge behind him.

Heimdall drew his robe closer without taking his gaze from Loki. A chill had crept into his flesh, into his bones, that had naught to do with the elements. The elements never affected the _Vindhlér,_ the Wind-shelter. But some cold still reached him, deep in the place where his heart beat its ponderous dirge.

When Heimdall didn’t answer, the inquirer answered his own inquiry. “ _This_ is the flesh that resists the glow of health and virility. _This_ is the skin that shrinks and withers under the gaze of Sól. _This_ is the body that _gave birth,_ like a woman’s!” Rage put a tremble in his voice and his fingers, but Heimdall stood still and unblinking in the face of it. His heart beat ponderously against his ribs, though his chest felt vast, vast and hollow. “And what did it give birth to? Monsters! Abominations! Things unfit for Asgard, unfit for this… this shining realm with its… its…”

He seemed to shudder, losing momentum, and Heimdall did not do what he would have done, had he the permission.  
He remained still, and at his distance, and waited.

But this infuriated Loki, for the first time, and his fury flared anew. “You are a _fool,_ a fool and a thick-headed lout, like that insufferable Thor, you are, just like him! You stand there and stare at me and don’t say a word, just _stare_ like some sort of lost cur— where are you going!”

“I hear all, but to all I need not listen.” Heimdall kept walking, although Loki screeched after him, a sound like a raven’s caw and like a snake’s hiss and like the unfathomable cry of a star being extinguished before its time.

_“Do **not** turn your back to me, Heimdall!”_

The guardian paused, stopped.  
And turned, but only his head. He graced Loki with the sharp planes of his profile, and nothing more.

“You have no understanding of— of what you ask for,” the trickster rasped, gemstone eyes boring into him. The fury was gone from his tone, exhausted, but still brittleness remained, and again the hollows opened in Heimdall’s chest.  
What in the realms did Heimdall not understand? What in all the realms _truly_ confounded the guardian…?  
“I— I am _not_ one of you. I never was, and never will be.”

“I was here the day you were brought into Asgard.” Heimdall still did not turn completely, his shoulders curving in as if to protect him. The hollows were too vast, and Loki’s eyes too shrewd, too prying. “The ice and frost faded out of your skin, and your voice. You did not grow tall and broad and fearsome, but small, smaller than the others, and thin and graceful…  
Even now, it is not your own flesh you wear. You have been shifting form since the moment you first passed me, nestling in swaddling clothes. And you wonder why your flesh does not favour you.”

“You know who— _what_ I am.” It was not a question. There was no reason for it to be one.

“And yet, you still doubt me.”

They were both surprised into silence, to hear Loki’s bitterness reflected in Heimdall’s heavy voice.

**VI.**

Cold, too cold. Heimdall shuddered, but soon he was shuddering from more than just the chill of Loki’s flesh, and he stopped paying it heed.  
Thin, and narrow, and sinuous. _Serpentine._ He coiled himself around the gatekeeper and held him fast, teeth sinking into vulnerable flesh.  
Gold and silver, shining and dark, and even with this contrast Heimdall lost himself, just long enough to forget the hollows.

“Ah, Heimdall,” Loki chuckled, their limbs still entwined — a dark sound, to be sure, but much of the threat was absent from that darkness. “Silly, _stupid_ Heimdall…”

Before, he’d never deigned to use the guardian’s name. Now, it seemed he couldn’t stop.

**VII.**

“You look troubled, Gatekeeper.” Loki drifted lazily towards him, a flash of pale and black against the gleaming rainbow bridge.

“I… see far.” If it were possible, Heimdall’s voice had taken on a new heaviness, one unrelated to the deepness of its tone or the slowness of its cadence. Loki arched a thin eyebrow, and gave a tight-lipped smile.

“You do. A pity. I do not envy you your sight.”

It never got easier, even after Loki gave small, veiled signs of beginning to trust him. Every time, Loki would approach at a distance, skirting around Heimdall, hidden safely behind his dry smirk and sharp eyes. And every time, it would be Heimdall who drew him out, with a meeting of lips or a meeting of hips.  
Perhaps they’d speak, later, in the canopied bed into which no eyes or ears could pry. Or, perhaps not. Heimdall never knew, and stopped trying to guess.

Loki’s eyes flashed impatiently when, this time, the guardian did not move.

“Guardian, you annoy me. Are you so preoccupied with looking ahead, or are you _here?_  
I am here, not ahead. _Here.”_

“Loki, we will… the end-of-things, the…” There was no name for it yet, for if Heimdall had no knowledge of its name, then it had not been named at all. To Heimdall — indeed, to all aesir — it was a _feeling,_ a cold knife in the heart or a flaming sword in the side, a sensation that stilled tongues and brought fear and sorrow to the eyes, an impression that darkened the minds of all who experienced it until something else came to bring back the light.

“I don’t _care!”_ Fury flared in the trickster’s eyes and voice, but Heimdall was no longer wary — it was fear, he knew now. Fear disguised, fear transformed.  
Loki clamped his hand around the back of Heimdall’s neck, and his eyes swam briefly as Loki’s forehead butted against his. Their gazes locked, and thought was cast away, and cold seeped into Heimdall’s flesh, and his pores opened to drink it in.

“I don’t care. This is now, and we are here, and we are _alive,_ and we are _together._  
Does that matter to you at all, or does it not? _Tell_ me.”

“It… does.”

**VIII.**

“Here…?” Heimdall stared down at Bifrost dubiously.

“What are you frightened of? No one will approach. Asgard sleeps.”

“This is… we cannot…”

“You are slow and old.” Loki cast off his garments as though they irritated him, flinging them to the shimmering surface under their feet. “Come. Let us be quick and young.”

“Loki, this is not—”

Heimdall subsided on a sigh when Loki’s deft hands found him, and — despite his objections — found him ready.

“Look at me.”

Indeed, it was much easier when he stopped looking everywhere else, and looked only at Loki.  
It was all much easier.

**IX.**

But it was Heimdall’s curse to see ahead, and Loki’s curse to grow in hatred. Loki’s visits grew infrequent, and he grew distant, then cruel. Heimdall did not object. He simply waited, and the hollows in him grew again, reclaiming their former glory and more.

As destined, it was the longsuffering Sigyn that accompanied Loki down deep into the earth, who witnessed his raging and his agony, who nursed him whilst the latent hatred burned like dry ice in the trickster’s veins.  
He cursed all the aesir, soundly, and Heimdall was counted amongst them. As destined.

As destined, Heimdall stood stolid at the end of the earth, and as Sól screamed and Surtur roared, Heimdall stroked the gleaming horn at his side, his breath feathering over the mouthpiece.

Yggdrasil shuddered.

So did the first note he blew on Gjallarhorn, his vision blurring for the first time since a squalling jotunn child was ushered into Asgard, ice and frost already fading from his skin.


End file.
